Dashboard plugin

Overview

The dashboard screen (the page with QuickPress, and Right Now stats) hasn’t been touched in ages. It’s all a bit cluttered, and based on my limited research it does a poor job of brining value to the majority of users. I’d like to explore some fresh ideas for ways to make the dashboard not only informational, but actionable for users.

Some data

I posted a survey to make/core last week asking a couple of questions specifically around the dashboard page design. In total we had 438 responses. A huge thank you to everyone who participated! Here are the results:

1. What portions of the dashboard do you like, and use every day? View 366 answers

4. What sort of modifications do you typically make to the dashboard (for yourself or for clients), and why? View 373 answers

5. If you could wave a magic wand, what types of things would you show on the dashboard? View 340 answers

It’s worth mentioning that this data is fairly biased, as the responses came mostly from the development community. With that said, there is still a great deal of insight here.

Insights

I’ll list a few things I learned from this data. I’d love to hear your reaction in the comments below. Let me know whether you agree/disagree with these conclusions:

A) As it stands, the majority of users find the existing default dashboard fairly cluttered and useless. We should look at which widgets might be better to start off disabled on a fresh WordPress install.

B) If possible, we should look to expand on the “Right Now” widget to provide even more information about your blog. One easy win would be to show all custom post types and taxonomies totals by default.

C) It might pay off to look into adding a “quick links” section with links to the areas of the admin that you visit most often. Making these links easily customizable on a per user basis would be a nice win.

D) It might be convenient to add an array option to wp-config which allows you to quickly disable dashboard widgets without having to mess with any additional code.

E) WordPress is used in a lot of different ways (mostly as a CMS, as a blog, or as both of those combined). It would be cool to figure out a way to determine how a user intends to use WordPress right when they first start, and then to do some stuff behind the scenes to simplify their intended experience based on which option they selected.

Next steps

In the comments please indicate:

1) If you have interest in working on this plugin
2) Your reactions to the insights mentioned above (A-E)
3) Any additional thoughts you have regarding the dashboard re-design

Once we figure out who is interested, we can set up a regular meeting time.

1. No
2-3.
I think it’s less about decluttering what’s there and making existing dash widgets more useful and more about figuring out what the purpose of the Dashboard actually is. Is it an overview of all your content? All activity? Is it actionable, a way to quickly do the most common things in WP? All of the above? If it’s the latter, to me that’s the perfect way to group the dashboard and help prioritize items. If people actually use the quick start guide there should probably be a permanent post format centric widget that allows you to quickly get started creating content regardless of CPT, but that would only link to the Post Editor. QuickPress is only quick if it suits your exact needs, if not it’s hugely cumbersome.

“Right Now” (which probably should just be called Activity) seems like a big win and worth expanding upon.

The Dashboard is the most useful on mobile devices since you’re likely to have just logged in to the admin from it and the Dashboard would be the first thing you see. If, on mobile, there was a quick way to know what’s been going on and quickly get a post started that’s a huge win. This is also in line with the mobile apps’ approaches.

Totally agree on the “Right Now” widget. Starting by changing its name maybe to something more like “Your site” or “Quick View” or something. It would be great if it’s transformed into a quick snapshot of the site’s vital signs including stats and other metrics about the “health” and current status of the site with some graphs, not only texts and raw numbers.

2. I agree that “Right Now” is a quick win, and that we could probably disable more things by default than we do now. I’ve done something like C before, but mostly by adding helpful, relevant documentation for users, and I’ve gotten good feedback on it. I agree with E totally.

3. I think widgets like “Right Now” are a good example of opportunities where we might give a ‘full-width’ option, where it optionally takes up two columns on a desktop and shows more robust information, but can be compressed to fit a single column or does so automatically on smaller viewports. As an unthoughtful example, full-width might show graphs, whereas the compressed version might just show numbers.

I also thinking revitalizing the Dashboard might bring more attention to it, and encourage some innovation in the plugin community.

C) “quick links” is a great idea. nearly every site I work with needs something like that (esp when 1st migrating to WP). Solution is to create a meta-box. But better might be to build that option into core.

Possibly a new Appearance> Menu intended just for Dashboard display, or that may be too rad. And the following is definitely way too rad: a Dashboard meta-box configurable per user for their own personalized “quick links.”

I love the idea of letting people create quick links to things (or just mark screens as favorites? would work for post list, individual edit screens, and option pages; could be a simple star in screen options).

Maybe news/other news/plugins/incoming links could all be replaced by a single, reusable RSS reader widget.

I wonder if QuickPress would get more love if it were more flexible. Maybe we can steal from O2 when it’s out?

Please note that the most probably reason for “Incoming Links” not being used any longer is because it’s simply not working very well. This widget could bring a lot more value if it could be hooked up with your analytics platform of choice for instance.

The Incoming links widget lost its use when they switched providers way back in the Technorati days. Once they started using the Google stuff, things broke or did not work as well. This has been the case since WordPress 2.3 if you can believe that.

I’m thrilled you’re leading this effort! It’s one of the most frequently seen parts of the UI yet has been a sad, orphaned design. While I was at Automattic I spent a lot of time thinking about it and probably have some design mockups somewhere. Anyway – I’m happy to help any way I can.

Designing dashboards always has the tough challenge of having to cover the very different use cases of: first time user, regular user, CMS user, blog user, etc. and designing for all them leads to disappointment, or a generic wasteland.

It’s also worthwhile to look at how other blog platforms and CMSs handle the same design challenge. Some (Drupal, Movable Type) have similar design problems to WordPress, but others like tumblr don’t really have a dashboard, making the basic UX flow always go through the posting UI, rather than dash first. Ghost has some interesting ideas too.

Love the idea of including CPTs. Would also add that it would be nice as an Admin to be able to specify exactly which CPTs get displayed. As an example…for devs who build sites for clients, there could be any number of CPTs created by various plugins (ecommerce as an example) and that dev could set those CPTs and no others to be displayed for the end user Admin.

1. I’m interested in using the plugin and providing feedback from a user experience perspective.

2A – I think that by default, a fresh install of WordPress should be configured to one column and to show the Welcome screen and once that has been turned off, the Right now box is displayed. By limiting things to one column and one metabox by default, it helps take away the impression of being cluttered.

2B – The Right Now box is the best thing the dashboard has going for it Right Now, (pun intended.) As I mentioned in the survey, I’d like to see Stats, Recent Comments, A list of Unpublished Content complete with Post status similar to the Edit Flow Plugin – Unpublished Content metabox. I’d also like to see something like a health monitor for the site that reports posts/pages giving off 404 errors or a warning that my average page speed the last 24 hours has increased a considerable amount. Perhaps a bit off scope but it would make the whole dashboard concept feel more like a dashboard.

2C – The admin bar currently takes care of shortcuts to add new Post, Media, Page, User, and Role. This doesn’t cover everything but it’s interesting that so many people want a quick links widget to do tasks that the admin bar already covers. So perhaps the admin bar is not working, is just not being used, is never seen or is just not the right place to be housing those shortcuts. If there is a quick links section, I would hope that somehow, WordPress would monitor my behaviour and over time, build the Quick Links section for me or at the very list, showed me the last 5-10 Admin pages I browsed to.

2D – Whatever makes the developers life easier to remove metaboxes from being seen, the better. I like how easy it would be to just add a WP-Config option to disable specific boxes from view.

2E – I’m a bit concerned with having users tell WordPress how they intend to use it. Or, how in the world could you group certain tasks in WordPress into categories like CMS, Blogging, Application, etc. WordPress is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, how do we reliably classify use cases to make something like this work?

3. Taking into consideration that many of the survey respondents were developers and consultants, many of their answers correlate with what they commonly experience with clients. The only issue I take with those responses is that I’m not a client. Reading over the survey responses, I get the feeling that people need a ton of hand holding to get anything done or to navigate anywhere within the WordPress back-end. Maybe that’s the case but not for me. I just don’t want to see a bunch of changes happen because consultants/developers need them to do less work and to please clients.

I think that keeping a single dashboard and trying to make it fit in with everyone’s requirements is doomed. The technology behind it should be modularised so that multiple dashboard screens can be created. Developers can create more dashboard screens, tweak current dashboard screens and change which the user lands on by default.

Then look at the widgets, focus on some simple functionality (like the ‘Right Now’ widget) and make it easier to configure and add to it. Currently we can add our own custom post types, but it could be done in a much nicer way (more the like the admin bar).

Lastly, I’d like to re-iterate the above points that you are getting your responses from developers. Not end users. But I think that’s a wider problem, and one reason why the WP Engine survey highlighted by Matt in state of the word was so interesting… and so I digress ;p

For the record – the concept of a widgets page for configuring the dashboard is a great idea – while I agree that it makes sense to come up with a better default dashboard – the usage of a business vs blog vs news source – are potentially very different. Unless the scope of this project includes creating numerous “best practice” dashboards for different use cases improving the dashboard modularity for end users is a good idea.

Since it is the first screen a user sees. It would be nice to have it start with one big column quick tips with a embed link from youtube or another site explaining how to do the basics (customizable). One could have links below the video for additional videos. Below the one column area there could be two columns one for “quick links” and the other for “right now.” The title area of the “boxes” could have drop downs with various options on what kind of info they want to see (One could also somewhere add a CSS box to change the design of the boxes or some options as to what they should look like). Developers should be able to customize it to help the client get started with WordPress.
Take one of the boxes and drag&drop it next to the huge one column area to create two columns. Etc.
Certain plugins for instance SEO adds a box to the Dashboard. Which means the plugin would also add it self to the drop down list of options to choose from.
The bottom line is that all users begin with seeing the Dashboard so it needs to be customizable and new and old user friendly.

Regarding “C” (making quick links) I think @jeffr0 commented on his site that someone else left a suggestion of a search tool in the dash “How do I …” so I could put in “Edit my sidebar” and it would pop up with a link. That would be better than making MORE links like we already have in the toolbar (up top) and the admin sidebars. If people can’t find where things are, then a search tool for that would be great. Bonus points if it was ‘where are…’ and I could put in ‘akismet settings’ and it would pop up with the link to the plugin settings. In theory all it would have to do is search the available sidebars for a name-match.

D (wp-config ways to remove/add setting options for all users) would be nice. Bear in mind Multisite This would be aces for setting up a site for someone else and wanting to simplify it.

The data seems to make it clear that its time to ditch or at severely minimize the RSS based news widgets. Like many I remove them by default in my starter core functionality plugin (not hard to do and not sure why we’d need/want that in WP-config). I disable them as much because they are SLOW as they are unnecessary visual clutter.

The data also seems to suggest Right Now could be the whole dashboard, just move comments, incoming links and drafts into it and it becomes the start of the stats focused dashboard people are hinting at. That’s the direction I’d like to see it go, ideally with some actual light weight native stats being shown, or the ability for plugins to hook stat reporting into Right Now)

Layout wise I envision Right Now taking up the full width of the dashboard, then additional widgets appearing below in a 2/3 column layout. By default though I’d have everything except Right Now hidden.

When I was building it, I found the tricky part was trying to balance each column of information, since inevitably some people will have tons of taxonomies and no custom post types, and vice-versa.

I do like the approach that some people have floated of making Right Now full-width and incorporating recent comments and drafts into it. Those are the three really functional pieces of the dashboard as far as I’m concerned. And by folding them into a larger widget, it means they can disappear when they’re not relevant, so people who don’t have any recent comments or drafts won’t need to be constantly reminded about that.

Just wanted to say that I’m going to give your plugin a try because based on the screenshots, I thought it was neat how you essentially put draft notices and other stuff right next to comments, post types, etc. A cool way to combine the two other most popular widgets Recent Drafts and Recent Comments all into the Right Now box. Nice work.

I very quickly made a “Recent Post Revisions” widget, a few lines of code (perhaps I should release it as a plugin), just displaying the last 20 post revisions. For a large site with several different authors, it’s fantastically useful, but for single-author blogs, probably much less so.

Welcome to the WordPress Design Group!

This is the official blog for the WordPress open source project's design and UI. Follow along and/or participate as we post about what we're currently working on, meetings, and big picture items. Glad to have you!

Email Updates

Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.